When enterprise AI finally grows up, it won’t be because another model got smarter. It’ll be because AI learned where to live and be truly useful.
That’s the quiet significance behind the new multi-year, $200 million partnership between Snowflake and OpenAI – a deal that’s less about flashy demos and more about behind-the-scenes plumbing. The kind CIOs actually trust.
According to Snowflake, OpenAI’s frontier models now become natively available inside Snowflake Cortex AI for all their customers – of which the likes of Canva and WHOOP are big names thus far. OpenAI and Snowflake also announced a joint product development and go-to-market strategy, especially for enterprise clients.
For years, enterprises have experimented with AI without any clear takeaways – with no real impact in 95% cases, according to an MIT study. The missing piece hasn’t been intelligence, but context. Because AI with enterprise data isn’t just clever but actually useful like never before.
AI that can reason over governed enterprise data, securely, at scale – that’s truly transformative. That’s where this Snowflake and OpenAI partnership aims to achieve.
Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy frames it as bringing “the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models” directly to “the secure, governed platform [customers] already trust.” Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Fidji Simo puts it as closing “the gap between what AI is capable of and the value businesses can create today.”
Under the hood, this isn’t a cloud-mediated arrangement or a loosely coupled API handshake. As Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin explains, “Snowflake customers have been able to use OpenAI models before, but this partnership is different in that it’s a direct, first-party partnership, rather than mediated through a cloud provider.”
According to Gultekin, that distinction is key, because it enables “deep, first-party integration of OpenAI’s frontier models directly into Snowflake’s governed AI platform, paired with a multi-year commercial commitment that ensures reliability, performance, and roadmap and GTM alignment.” This means fewer integration surprises, and a clearer path from pilot to production.
The co-innovation angle isn’t marketing fluff either. OpenAI itself runs key parts of its own stack on Snowflake, while Snowflake embeds OpenAI models into Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence. “This creates a tight feedback loop where each company is actively helping improve the other’s technology based on real-world enterprise usage,” Gultekin notes. That kind of mutual dependency is rare and, of course, powerful.
The practical upshot is agentic AI that actually does things. This means agents that can reason over structured and unstructured data, take action across enterprise tools, and operate inside strict governance boundaries. Snowflake Intelligence, powered by models like GPT-5.2, aims to give every employee a natural-language interface to their company’s collective knowledge – usable for anyone without an SQL degree as well.
Of course, betting big on OpenAI raises an obvious question, which I asked Gultekin. Does Snowflake risk becoming a one-model company? Gultekin is emphatic that it doesn’t. “Snowflake’s AI strategy is model-agnostic by design,” he says. “OpenAI is an important partner, and it is one of several frontier model providers available on Snowflake today, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others.” Customers keep the choice – and the controls.
Zooming out, this partnership signals where enterprise AI is headed next. Less experimentation at the edges, more intelligence embedded at the core. AI not as a novelty, but as infrastructure.
Also read: AI isn’t about bigger models: Snowflake’s Jeff Hollan on agentic AI future
